Robots vs. minimum wage: As pressure grows on McDonald's, Applebee's does an end run

In this Thursday, Dec. 5, 2013 file photo, protesters rally for better wages at a Wendy's in Detroit. Fast food chains are the epicenter of the battle over the minimum wage, with employees staging protests for an increase.

As pressure has been growing to hike the minimum wage, President Obama is now taking up the cause. Meanwhile, without great fanfare, two major restaurant chains have taken the first step toward replacing low-wage staff with automation.

“Our intention is not to replace servers, who provide a personal connection that is invaluable in our restaurants and to our ‘See You Tomorrow’ experience. This is about building on to the experience for the guest, not saving on labor.”

"People don’t go into business to create jobs; they go into business to make money. Labor is a cost," Goldberg wrote, "The more expensive labor is, the more attractive nonhuman replacements for labor become. The minimum wage makes labor more expensive. Obama knows this, which is why he so often demonizes ATMs as job-killers."

The Applebee's tablets will be provided by E la Carte, whose founder Rajat Suri, Forbes reported, "admits that with technology like his tablets, such concern will always be there. E la Carte stays agnostic about how restaurants choose to use its systems, the company says, and Applebee’s insists that it won’t downsize staff after this massive rollout is completed."

“Very clearly, our intention is not to replace servers, who provide a personal connection that is invaluable in our restaurants and to our ‘See You Tomorrow’ experience,” Applebee's president Mike Archer told Forbes. “This is about building on to the experience for the guest, not saving on labor.”

But as Goldberg notes, "if you’ve read any science fiction, you know that’s what the masterminds of every robot takeover say: 'We’re here to help. We’re not a threat.’ ”

While debate rages over the disemployment effects of the minimum wage and the role technology may play, some policy analysts like James Pethokoukis at the American Enterprise Institute are calling for approaches that could help low-wage/low-skill workers without encouraging employers to phase them out.

Pethokoukis cites a number of proposals that would directly subsidize low-wage workers from tax revenue, including some that would directly subsidize at the paycheck with a reverse payroll tax. That proposal was offered by consultant Oren Cass, who argued that “the effect in many ways would mirror a substantial increase in the minimum wage. But whereas a price control would tend to decrease the size of the labor force, a subsidy would tend to increase it.”

So are robots a long-term threat to human labor, or an asset to human life?

"While the displacement of formerly human jobs gets all the headlines, the greatest benefits bestowed by robots and automation come from their occupation of jobs we are unable to do," wrote Kevin Kelly last year in Wired. "We don’t have the attention span to inspect every square millimeter of every CAT scan looking for cancer cells. We don’t have the millisecond reflexes needed to inflate molten glass into the shape of a bottle. We don’t have an infallible memory to keep track of every pitch in Major League Baseball and calculate the probability of the next pitch in real time.

"We aren’t giving 'good jobs' to robots," Kelly concludes, "Most of the time we are giving them jobs we could never do. Without them, these jobs would remain undone."

Popular Comments

I have worked since I was 10 years old - mowing lawns,
paper routes, bus boy, dishwasher, cook, delivery, gas station, janitorial.
Graduated from college and started doing, for me, more interesting things like
working in
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11:13 p.m. Dec. 9, 2013

Top comment

spring street

SALT LAKE CITY, UT

"People don’t go into business to create jobs; they go into business
to make money. Labor is a cost," Applebee's President Goldberg
wrote.

Wait, then why do we keep hearing how we need to worship the
rich because they
More..

5:09 p.m. Dec. 9, 2013

Top comment

A1994

Centerville, UT

To strike for a 'fair paying' server job just seems to be aiming low.
It used to be that teenagers and young adults took server jobs to get a little
spending money. Why would we expect McDonalds to start paying a 'living
wage'
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Eric Schulzke writes on national politics and policy for the Deseret News and directs The Apollo 13 Project, a prisoner reentry awareness initiative at Utah Valley University. He earned his Ph.D. in Political Science at more ..